Another childhood memory destroyed by CGI,* thank you Ghibli. Maybe Miyazaki is right and you just need to die.
The CGI kinda works when characters are shown from far away, moving, in large crowds or from the back (yes, please do that if it saves you money), but as soon as you can see faces more closely the horrible plastic facial expressions and movements become apparent and it all falls apart.
I think part of my dislike might actually be my wrong expectations, I imagined everything much more grimdark, the people older and dirtier (more bearded!) and not the lollipop-coloured thing DisneyGhibli made of it.
Also: Hello Smurfette, fancy seeing you here.
Btw, the Wildtruden/Harpies were by far the best thing about Ronja, a glimpse of what it could have been (would have scared me to death as a child though):
As a consolation have some nice, hand-drawn concept art (Via):
* And I’m not even really a fan of Ronia, can’t remember if I ever completely watched the movie. Maybe I should, I kinda wanna know how the harpies looked there. Could do a double feature with Momo ^___^
Image of the movie’s version of the harpies. I personally find them far more intimidating.
And yeah, I was also bummed about how young people seemed. Lovis(Ronya’s mom) was also far too lifeless compared to both book and movie(she was calm in both, but not boring).
And Skalle-Per(the old guy) seems to be as boring an “anime old man” as you can get, while the book version was a hilarious jerkwad and the movie took that and ran with it(certainly didn’t hurt that he was played by one of Sweden’s most skilled actors, too).
Wow, thanks for the comment and the screencap of the harpies, they look really scary!
I’m pretty worried about where Studion Ghibli is going after The Wind Rises was pretty problematic (and boring) but I have my hopes on Princess Kaguya and When Marnie Was There (they just have to make something good by accident once in a while).